Sacrifices (18 page)

The bedrooms were on the left, past the kitchen. Clarence walked softly in that direction, his shoes making no sound on the carpet.

Jerome ushered Leland and Hector in and closed the door.

Clarence paused at the beginning of the hall. He could see the door to the master bedroom, open a crack, at the far end. It might make sense to send Jerome in first. That'd
be less dangerous, but Jerome didn't necessarily draw a distinction between surprising and threatening. Phil might end up with holes in him if he was up to anything more unusual than taking a nap. That wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would be a pain in the ass.

Clarence took a few more steps, then stopped as a sound reached him. Words, or something with the cadence of words. Nothing intelligible.

He glanced back. Hector's eyes were alight, his head cocked as he listened. Yeah, this was the kind of shit he was looking for.

Clarence walked to the end of the hall and paused. He couldn't see anything through the crack, couldn't make out any words in the stream of gibberish Phil was muttering on the other side. He listened carefully for the sound of anything that wasn't Phil—a freakish dog thing, maybe—concentrating so hard he heard the sound of his pulse swishing in his ears.

Nothing.

He pushed the door open.

The scene that greeted him was too bizarre to process, and for what must have been a minute or more he stood frozen at the doorway. His first insane thought was that he was staring at a huge, bloody eye, hung vertically so that its pointed oval shape stretched in the floor-to-ceiling direction. His next thought was that no, it was a wound, stretched and pulled into that shape, followed closely by the idea that it was a psychopath's deranged depiction of a vagina. It was five feet high or more, oval, splashed in dark red blood, and mounted on a rectangular frame.

His mind slowly put the scene together. It was a bed, actually, or had been once. It had been tipped up against the wall, nearly vertical, and the mattress slashed open in the middle. The slash had been pulled open, creating that stretched oval, and then it had been, bizarrely, packed with meat. There had to be two hundred pounds of meat there, some of it impaled on the exposed bedsprings, some just crammed into the hole.

The bed frame itself had been used as a mounting
frame for a webwork of string that crisscrossed the mattress in a sort of broken spiral pattern that circled and partly covered the opening. The hole in the center was what had given Clarence the impression of an eye.

No wonder Phil's old lady was tearing ass out of here.

Phil's muttering hadn't so much as broken rhythm. Bare-ass naked, he squatted in front of his disgusting creation, muttering and tracing a pattern on his forehead or face—Clarence couldn't quite tell from back here, with Phil facing away.

Shoot him,
Clarence thought.
Couple of quick taps and get out of here.
It wasn't the blood. Clarence had hurt a lot of people in his time, and had watched a lot more get hurt. But this . . . This shit was
unholy
.

“Fuck me,” one of the guys behind him said. Clarence just nodded.

The advancing stink told him Hector was coming, and he returned to the moment. Hector's face bore a wide smile as he approached, and Clarence stepped to the side as much to get away from him as to let him pass.

Hector placed his hand on Phil's shoulder, and finally Phil stopped talking. He looked up abruptly, mouth hanging open.

Hector smiled at him. “A fitting tribute,” he said. “The flies will grow thick upon it, and Belzebuth will delight.”

Phil's mouth still gaped. A strand of bloody saliva hung from the scrubby shit on his chin he called a beard.

Wipe it off. Wipe that shit off and fucking
pretend
you're a goddamn human being.

“Rise,” Hector said, still beaming at Phil. His fractured persona had been annealed into a lens or a mirror, focusing all his intensity on the man. Clarence could
feel
it, even off to the side. He felt in himself a desire to follow Hector's instruction—a small desire, easily ignored, but it caught him by surprise.
“Rise,”
Hector said again. “You have made your gift. Now we have great work to undertake.”

Phil stood.

“Now, calm yourself. Recite the Nine Words and the Prayer of Abaddon.”

Phil started talking a bunch of bullshit again, and Hector started talking right alongside him. This had gone far enough, Clarence thought. This Hector guy was nuts, and maybe playing him besides, but he sure as shit wasn't calming things down. Clarence moved to pull out his gun, and—

Actually, he didn't move at all. Couldn't. “Jerome?” he said.

“Uh . . . I'm stuck.”

Hector smiled at Clarence, his mouth huge and terrifying.

“My son?” he said to Phil. “Clean and clothe yourself.”

This time, Phil hesitated. “Why?”

“In time, we will bleed the innocent and feast on the flesh of our foes, living and dead. We start down that road today.” This time, he put both hands on Phil's shoulders. “You will be my sword and my pistol, my cleaver and maul.”

Phil grinned, revealing red teeth.

“Now,” Hector said, facing Clarence, Jerome, and Leland. “You three. We have much to discuss.”

Karyn lay back
in bed and stared at the roof beam again. She knew it was there from the demon image, but in her eyes the roof was now a hole with charred edges, blue sky beyond instead of the night sky that corresponded with the hour. If she could just concentrate, get the beam to come back . . .

Ten minutes of staring did little but give her a headache, some kind of tension thing that crawled up from her shoulders through the back of her neck and planted crampons in the base of her skull. She tried to breathe slowly, to force herself to relax and just let the view come of its own accord, but that didn't work worth a damn, either.

In her mind, the image shifted to a field of stars. Nighttime in some cool or arid place, the sky an impossibly deep black, the stars against it glinting pinpricks of unreal clarity. It reminded her of camping as a kid, a trip up to Lake Tahoe. The stars had been like this there, and she'd watched them for hours.

The image focused on one star in the center, and then something odd and disorienting happened: the focus changed. One star in the center stood out in almost three dimensions, as if it would be possible to pluck it from its inky setting, and the others around it faded, first to dull points, then to a sort of gray soup in the background as the focus on the center star intensified. It was a familiar
sensation, so familiar that she expected it to come with a sort of tight feeling in her eyes that wasn't actually present.

She recognized it now. She'd done the same thing during those nights at camp, lying on a picnic table away from the fire and watching the star. Focus on one, let the others fade. It was disorienting and a strain on her eyes, impossible to keep up for long, but fascinating when she could maintain it for more than a few seconds.

In her mind, the sequence repeated itself.

These are instructions.
Did the demon actually know how this worked?

It was worth a try.

She tried focusing on the spot where the roof beam was supposed to be, tried to force her eyes into that hyperfocused state. There was nothing to focus
on
, though, as far as her eyes were concerned, and the pain in her head crept around to the front, becoming a band that encircled her skull. After endless minutes with nothing to show for her effort, she took a different tack. Instead, she tried focusing on the image in her mind, bringing it to the point where her eyes were straining. A bolt of nausea shot through her stomach, and her head spun. For a moment, a bare fraction of a second, she thought she saw the roof beam, though that might have merely been the image.

She closed her eyes. She didn't drift off to sleep so much as she was dragged down to it.

*   *   *

A light exploded in Karyn's head, jolting her awake. She sat upright, knocking over a glass of water and raising her hand to protect her eyes, but the light wasn't coming from outside. The blinding sensation hurt her
mind
, not her eyes.

“What?” she snarled.

The light vanished. A hooded figure stood in front of a stage. The curtain, red velvet, was down, blocking the stage from view, but as Karyn watched, the figure gestured grandly with one arm, and the curtain drew back.

On the stage, a good-sized home office, complete with
an oversize desk and a sort of long counter along the back wall. Every flat surface was piled with manila folders, leather-bound books, and stacks of paper. Special Agent Elliot, in a tank top and sweatpants, sat in an awkward cross-legged position on the desk chair, a dozen documents laid out in front of her.

The stage setting was gone, Karyn noticed. Whether it had vanished abruptly or just faded out, she had no idea. She was in the room with Elliot now.

Elliot wasn't looking at the documents. She was instead staring at a minuscule something held pinched between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. From her vantage point, Karyn couldn't see it, but that didn't matter.

Is this real?
she wondered. If so, how was she seeing it? The splinter was
there
. Was this pure fantasy or an extrapolation conjured up by the demon? A dramatic reenactment, as it were?

Her ruminations were cut off as Elliot abruptly swung her legs off the chair. Elliot stood, took a step from the desk, then picked up one of the documents. The paper was covered in weird symbols and handwritten Latin, neither of which Karyn understood. Elliot threw it back down on the bed with a look of fear and disgust, put the splinter down on the headboard, and disappeared into a room off to the side. A few moments later, she came out, drying her face with a towel. She looked at something on her laptop, then turned back to the document.

After staring at the document for a minute or more, her mouth working as though she was talking to herself, shaking her head every so often, she put it down again.

The corner behind her swelled with darkness, from which a pair of baleful eyes shone above a gleaming, tooth-filled grin.

Elliot picked up the splinter.

Don't do it,
Karyn thought, suddenly repenting of her decision.
There has to be some other way to do this.

Elliot, cleverer than Karyn had been, and with more luxury to consider, stood facing the wall. She arched her
foot, put the splinter between her big toe and the wall, and then stepped down, forcing her toe forward. Her face twisted in a grimace, more shock at the pain than at the pain itself. She looked down. Half the splinter still stuck from her toe.

She squeezed her eyes shut—then suddenly opened them and kicked the wall.

She dropped to the floor clutching her foot.

“Enough,” Karyn said. “I've seen enough.” The image didn't vanish, though. A scaly hand extended from the darkness and settled on Elliot's shoulder.

Elliot looked up, making eye contact with Karyn.

The vision vanished, returning to Karyn's room.

Before Karyn could mentally adjust to being back in the loft, her phone lit up with a text message. She picked up the phone. A short note, from a number she didn't recognize:
We need to meet. NOW.

Karyn got up and started looking for her shoes.

*   *   *

Elliot met them at the front of the municipal building. She'd traded in her sweatpants and tank top for jeans and a plain blue blouse rather than reverting to FBI duds. She still managed to exude an aura of “cop,” Karyn thought. When she saw the car pull up, she started hobbling over.

“Last chance to speed off into the night,” Nail said. “Morning. Whatever.” He was still complaining about getting called for chauffeur duty at two in the morning, but it wasn't like the buses were running at this hour.

“No. This is what we came for.”

“Pretty sure she's carrying,” Nail said. “Shirt's loose, but it ain't
that
loose.”

“I don't think she's going to shoot us.”

“Just saying.”

Elliot tapped on the window, and Karyn directed her to the back with a movement of her head. A moment later, Elliot got in.

“Where are we going?” Elliot asked.

“You hungry?” Nail asked.

“No.”

“Then we're going to go sit under a bridge somewhere, I guess.” He pulled the car away from the curb and accelerated.

Nobody spoke for a little while. The radio played Top 40 at a volume low enough for Karyn to ignore. No point in talking yet. She didn't want to have this discussion without being able to look Elliot in the face.

Elliot wasn't inclined to wait, apparently. “Amaimon,” she said.

Karyn craned her neck to see Elliot, who moved to the middle seat to accommodate her. “What?”

“The name of your demon.”

“
Our
demon.”

“Yeah. It's called Amaimon.”

The image of the car interior vanished briefly. A blue-cloaked woman in what looked like some kind of medieval finery curtsied and then disappeared.

“What does that mean?” Karyn asked.

“It's a name. It doesn't mean anything, that I know of.”

“No, I mean what's the importance? Why does it matter?”

“My mostly useless reference material,” she said, stressing the words bitterly, “actually had a few things to say about it. Supposedly, it grants visions.”

“You don't say.”

“It also—supposedly—knows the future and the past, can make people fly, can raise the dead, has terrible breath, and was once bound by Solomon to build an impenetrable prison. Among a bunch of other nonsense that may or may not have any basis in fact.”

Knows the future, my ass,
Karyn thought.
Not unless it gets it from me.
“Okay. That's not really what I wanted to talk about, but it's good to know.”

“I want Belial,” Elliot said.

“Pull over, would you?” Karyn asked Nail. She needed to get out, talk with Elliot face-to-face, even if it meant sitting on the sidewalk.

Nail pulled the car over. In the small lot next to where
he'd parked was a cement circle with a round platform in the middle. An ugly, misguided piece of art, but nobody was around and it would work for a sit-down.

The three of them got out. Karyn sat on the concrete platform. Elliot did likewise. Nail stood, watching the neighborhood and half listening.

“Belial,” Karyn said.

“Two prisoners escaped last night. Killed half a dozen guards on the way out and started a riot.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.” She was, too, not that the words were likely to be of any help.

“Yeah. Well, they were Belial's. I saw photos. It was . . . pretty ugly. How many more does he have? That he can infect others with?”

“I don't know. A lot.”

“I keep thinking about those images your—Amaimon showed me. The ones showing Belial in action. I think they're for real. Two unarmed men blasted a hole through a wall and killed six guards, and God knows what they're doing now. A hundred people like that could wreak devastation on a terrifying scale.”

“That's . . . true.” Karyn felt a hint of shame. She'd been so focused on Anna that she hadn't really thought about the wider scale of the problem. Not in any meaningful way.

“I want Belial,” Elliot said again. “Whether I bring him in or take him down.”

Karyn shook her head solemnly. “You can't take him down. I don't know anybody else who can get the demons out of his guys. We need to get that from him, and then you do whatever you need to. Otherwise, all those people die. You said yourself that there's no credible exorcism.”

Elliot's expression was steady, unyielding. “I'm not sure we can save them. I'm not sure we ought to.”

“Let me put it this way: If you don't exorcise them and you don't kill them, there's nothing to stop them doing more of the same, at least until they wear out. Belial is at the top, but he's not the only concern.”

“You're worried about Anna.”

“That's high on my list, yes.”

“We'll do the best we can, but I really think we need to keep the big picture in mind.”

“You think all you want about that ‘big picture.' Just remember that as far as I'm concerned, the central figure in it is Anna, and everybody else is just gray shapes in the background.”

Elliot glanced down at her hands, then back up at Karyn. There was a sorrow in her eyes, something that looked awfully close to pity. “I don't mean to make light of your situation—at all—but have you done much of anything but manage your gift since it manifested?”

“I don't have much of a choice,” Karyn said.

“I didn't say you did. I'm just saying that tends to make you pretty focused on yourself all the time.”

Karyn felt heat rise to her neck, and she knew that a red blotch was spreading up the side of her face, as sometimes happened when she was really pissed. “That is not fair.”

“There's nothing fair about any of it. All I'm saying is that your perspective is pretty narrow. Necessarily, maybe, but there's more to the world than you and yours.”

“I don't know about that.”

Elliot leaned back, both arms braced against the concrete and holding her up. To her credit, she didn't look the slightest bit exasperated. “You're a cynic.”

“Do you think I wanted to spend my life stealing weird crap from crazy people and giving it to other crazy people? I didn't know about any of this occult junk until I had to, and I'd have died happy if I'd never had to learn.”

“‘While men plan, God laughs.' Isn't that the saying? You're not that special.”

I don't need this,
Karyn thought. She carried enough guilt to last a lifetime, she'd done enough she was ashamed of that her conscience was bent and crushed under the load, and this impromptu, bullshit tough-love session wasn't helping. “You got anything on the photo, or do you want to keep making me feel like shit about myself?”

The long look Elliot gave her made her think the woman
didn't want to let it go, and they were going to go another two rounds. Elliot surprised her, though. “I don't know if it's gang work, but it's right in gang territory.”

“Go on.”

“I only know of six gang-affiliated practitioners in the county. Three are in custody, two are presumed dead, and one is acting as an informant. None of them ever worked at that scale.”

“There are a lot of gang members in L.A.”

“Forty thousand or so, at last count. Over a hundred thousand in the county.”

“So maybe you missed some,” Karyn said.

“Maybe. But this kind of thing doesn't usually just pop up overnight. Additionally, it has some odd markers in it. They actually reminded me of something, so I went back and pulled this.” She brought a picture up on her phone and showed it to Karyn. Nail tore himself away from neighborhood watch duty and came over to look at it with her.

The picture was small, but it was easy to make out the field of gray it depicted. Ash. Lots of ash. Some charred remnants of structural members sticking up from the black and gray heaps that filled what looked like the outline of a room. The place had burned to the ground, exposing the entirety to the sky. Karyn didn't see what Elliot thought was so important, and she said so, so Elliot zoomed in. In the bottom right corner of the blasted room were what looked like traces of occult symbols. Karyn zoomed in farther. The resolution was terrible this close, but it was good enough to tell that her first impression hadn't been wrong.